A Gifted Young Man
Seattle, fall 2001. Barry Evans, 23, moves out from central Illinois to become a novelist. He has no job, no contacts, and one rule: no MFA. Weeks later he’s broke and standing in the University of Washington English Department, asking about the program.
There he meets Jake, a star of the program, who challenges him to apply before this year’s deadline, one week away. Jake reads Barry’s writing sample and tells him it’s bad. He needs a new one. His first assignment as Jake’s protégé: tag along on a night out with Jake and his girlfriend, and write it up. But that night shows Barry who Jake really is, and the true story would end him.
Seeking representation
Chapter One: Witness
A mossy sidewalk in Pioneer Square.
Barry Evans emerged from his dank hostel into the November drizzle with a dozen job applications wilting in his grip like a soggy bouquet of dead flowers. At last the somber bus lumbered forth from the mist. Inside, he slipped down the crowded aisle and felt his soaked college khakis fusing with the damp pants of the person on either side of him.
This is it. A serious novelist at the beginning of his career.
No, that wasn’t the story he told himself. This was:
There is no narrative. You can make it up. You can. I’m not falling for it.
The result of Barry Evans’ insistence that there was no story of his life was that everything he saw was a pointless string of vignettes—random people, random happenings. Nothing to do with him. The space he took up was an absence: “Wherever I am, I am what is missing.”
Strand.
Impossible to believe that just a year ago, on the University of Chicago campus but two hours from his own much humbler private liberal arts institution, he had met the great Mark Strand. In the flesh. What a way to meet someone: In the flesh. How embarrassing.
At a glance he noticed that the regular sadsack busriders were now joined by yet another batch of the recently laid-off. He would scribble a note about this worsening state of things on the back of his transfer slip when he had a chance to move his arms. Then he would add it to the other notes filling up a Safeway bag back at the hostel.
But nothing could make those pointless notes come together. No amount of scribbling could get him out of the story he was trapped in.
Is that it? I am trapped in a story? Okay, then whose?
Drops of rain streaked down the window.
Even in someone else’ story, I am but a mindless mote floating in the mist.
Out on the street he caught sight of a sign pointing to his favorite bookstore, Elliott Bay, on First Avenue, two blocks away.
The bookstore is not my destination. His thumb hesitated over the stop button for one turn of the wheels, when he countered himself: But neither is the temp agency.
He got off the bus. It was the bookstore, not the temp agency, that removed him from what passed as the real world, the gray hallways he wandered sheepishly with the grand goal of becoming underemployed.
Elliott Bay’s Dickensian storefront was filled with copies of a single poster:
Double-blind
by New York Times bestselling author
Ryan Clark
A Tale of Two Cities meets The Prestige in this instant postmodern classic.
And beneath these words was an image of two young men sitting across a table, with two panes of beamsplitter glass between them. They could hardly see each other. The vision of each was disturbed by words that appeared only on his side.
Though Barry didn’t know it, he must have sensed it even then: The book was about him. He’d written the author countless letters throughout his senior year of high school, the year his parents’ marriage fell apart because of what he’d witnessed his father do.